"Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."

Which would still require royalty payments. I'd love to see Vorbis/Ogg but the reality is people love their proprietary formats, even if it yields no real benefit above the free alternatives.

Rubbish. People would be absolutely fine with royalty free ogg vorbis if they thought their system had it.

What actually happens if you try to play an ogg vorbis file on a default-install Windows system is that Windows doesn't even try to get a codec (as it does for other formats) but rather it shows a message that ogg vorbis isn't supported.

If you read that message casually, you might be lead to believe that Windows software actually couldn't support that format, rather than the actual truth, which is that Microsoft doesn't want you to use it (lest you become less tied to Windows).